As I was taking my daughter to the schoolbus early one morning, I happened to look up to this amazing mottled sky. As soon as she was in the bus, I ran back home, grabbed my camera and wide angle lens and came back to shoot this.

As I have already said, one of my favourite things in Hong Kong is how nature keeps fighting for its rights. Within 10 minutes of the densest parts of the city, there’s jungle and you would not know the city is nearby. Even in the most urban areas, there are massive trees and the plants survive. My bet is, if the city was abandoned, within months the plants would take back what’s rightfully theirs…

One of the things I wanted to do with a wide-angle lens was vertical shots of Hong Kong. It’s such a vertical city that these vertical scapes offer great variety. In Central of course is where the buildings are the highest…

Anyone living in Asia is familiar with this posture that I have taken to calling the Asian Squat. It’s mostly men that squat like that in China, but occasionally you’ll see women as well. I’ve seen this in China, in India, in Malaysia. Most of the time these days there’s a mobile phone involved, but not here.

Shooting from the hip makes for different compositions. I spotted those two girls leisurely leaning on the lamppost and knew I had to get close to capture the expressions naturally. I’m happy I did, I think it makes for a good shot.

There are a lot of smokers here in Hong Kong and I’ve been trying for a long time to get some good street shots of people smoking, but shy of sticking my camera in their face – which I’m loathe to do – it’s hard. This one is the first shot I really like, not only because you see the subjects is smoking but because you see the smoke.

Hong Kong is not quite China, but in some ways it is. Just in front of the Causeway Bay Apple Store, there’s a string of back of the truck electronics for sale, including iphones (probably fake, but I can’t say for sure). This particular one attracted my attention because of the umbrella (protecting her from the sun) but also because she seems so much not to care.

When you shoot street there are sometimes things you discover after the shot that strike you as more significant than what you wanted to shoot in the first place. Such is the case here, I only noticed the guy peering out the top window when processing the shot.